Bad art is doing very nicely these days, and the reason is that people want a message. An early symptom was the galloping first-personism of movie reviewers: “I feel…” was a hard-to-beat gambit, since who can refute a feeling? A more impartial claim was suggested by the successor locution “It feels like…”—where the “it” meant that the feeling in question ought to move anyone. The broad-church piety was harder to challenge than a mere first person. Meanwhile, negative judgments were on the way to becoming prohibited so long as the work wore its good intentions on its sleeve.
This is not a question of sincerity. Oscar Wilde said, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,” and in The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon recoiled from the display of affection by the happily married: “It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.” A great deal of the admired and well-rewarded art of our time consists of washing one’s clean linen in public.
That the artist should have a function separate from the existing cultural or political apparatus is by no means a timeless idea. It goes back to the mid-18th century and found its clearest formulation in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). You may know a work of art, Schiller wrote, by a commitment that looks like detachment. It does not make you want to go out and do something. This was a radical proposal, rather than a virtue at home in the Age of Enlightenment. The taste of the age was more truly represented by Joseph Addison’s verse tragedy Cato (1712), Whig propaganda for a civic-republican ideal that gave pleasure to three generations of viewers, but the sentiments they warmed to are now so frigid it is impossible to imagine what those people were feeling. The same is true of the high art celebrated by the ancien régime—a painter like François Boucher, for example.
The successful artist shares with the politician a recurrent temptation to indulge in emotional claptrap. Bernard Bosanquet in Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915) proposed that this urge to chase after tears or laughter could be quelled by attaching the art-emotion to a particular object and not a set of reactions. His consequent definition of art was “feeling expressed for expression’s sake.” Notice, however, that this is something only the deranged would dream of wanting in real life. Our everyday expressions of feeling are spontaneous and practical; they are never “for expression’s sake.” By contrast, aesthetic feeling is self-sufficient.
Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Breathless deals with a young thug and his dame and the binge of fraud, flight, and betrayal their infatuation puts them through. Nothing obliges us to think these people admirable human specimens. Nor do we think them detestable. It is enough that they are interesting, and their surface glamour accounts for much of the effect. There is a moment quite early when the hero turns toward the camera and addresses the audience head-on: “C’est jolie, la campagne…. Si vous n’aimez pas la mer—si vous n’aimez pas la montagne—si vous n’aimez pas la ville: allez vous faire foutre.” (It’s beautiful, the countryside. If you don’t like the sea—if you don’t like the mountains—if you don’t like cities: to hell with you.)
